Meet the AI Rapper Working for the Far-Right

A self-shot phone video shows an Asian man standing in a crowd saying “We are here” to the camera. Cut to a chiseled skinhead. He snorts in derision and replies, “Not for long”, before covering his face in a union jack bandana.

The social media video then cuts to a clip of the skinhead marching in military-style formation with dozens of others, all wearing black fatigues. Next, he slams a man to the ground. Then, we see the shaven headed man speeding a van labelled “deportation unit” through London. Finally, a queue for a deportation flight out of the country.

The skinhead is Danny Bones, a new musician who raps about immigration, national identity and a broken Britain, while taking vigilante action against migrants and rioting against the police – part pop star, part action hero.

The video to his most popular song This Is England looks gritty, drawing on images of a country in decline. Rubbish-strewn back streets, boarded-up shops, cars gutted by arson, graffiti and crap weather. “This is England” he sings plaintively in the song’s chorus, “don’t ask why”. Britain is “falling” and this is the grim reality.

But Bones is not real.

Look closely and all the telltale signs of AI slop are there. The video jerks in places. He looks human enough, but Bones’s mouth doesn’t quite track with the lyrics. The bleak aesthetic is hyper-real and yet feels strangely other worldly. It’s hard not to get the sense that you’re watching a scene cut from a video game.

Bones is an AI creation created by a shadowy agency linked to a far-right political party backed by the world’s richest man. An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has uncovered links between the operation behind the persona and Ben Habib’s party Advance UK. Experts believe this is the first time an AI character has been linked to a political party, and say Bones is a concerning sign of things to come.

Far-right slop.

The fact that Bones doesn’t exist hasn’t stopped him gaining a level of success that many musicians could only dream of. He sounds fairly human and the production quality of his tracks is better than you might expect from AI.

His creators, the Node Project, call Bones “a British storyteller who writes how he sees it. Working-class, worn down and still swinging… Every word sounds like it comes from somewhere real, despite carrying the feeling that nothing really is.” His four tracks have garnered more than 375,000 Spotify and YouTube streams, but his music has reached a far larger audience via short-form video. His songs are cut into YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and TikToks that have been viewed nearly three million times.

The lyrics to Bones’s songs touch on government authoritarianism, crumbling public services, growing inequality and the general decline in material living standards. To a casual listener, This Is England could almost sound like an iconoclastic leftwing protest song. It plays on concerns that are widely held across the country. “Streets are boarded, the prices are soaring… The rich getting richer, the poor get extorted, they’ll paint you a picture all broke and distorted,” Bones spits.

However, look and listen carefully and the implicit message that foreigners are ultimately to blame becomes clear. The video for This Is England crescendoes as Bones leads a crowd of men carrying St George’s crosses with their fists in the air. “The streets are saying that it’s Britain that we’re mourning. Benefits are rampant, the borders are opening,” he sings. In his track Traitors Freestyle, Bones raps about opponents trying to “rid you of your heritage”. In another track, Shut Up, he rails: “Won’t buy the lies you’re selling with the goal of separation with more mass immigration, ain’t a thought of preservation.”

The nationalistic tone of the lyrics and imagery is no accident. Bones was created by a creative project that has been linked to the far-right party Advance UK.

Former Reform UK co-deputy leader Habib launched Advance UK last year. Habib recently signalled that he would like to join forces with Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, potentially creating a force even further right than Reform. In August, Advance UK got backing from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who said: “Advance UK will actually drive change. [Nigel] Farage is weak sauce who will do nothing.”

It’s unclear who is behind the Node Project. It told Novara Media that it is “a creative project built around fictional characters, music, visual storytelling and world-building”.

An Advance UK campaign video – previously the flagship video on the party’s website before it was taken down earlier this week – is made by the Node Project and soundtracked by an instrumental version of This Is England. (The Node Project told Novara Media the video used a “separate instrumental interpolation only, with no Bones lyrics, and it was not the same instrumental as any released Bones track”.)

The campaign video, released in January and viewed more than 250k times, is a selective run-through of the history of England, replete with Roman soldiers, Game of Thrones-style knights in plate armour and the Beatles walking Abbey Road, and ends with the slogan “a culture worth defending”. 

More videos using Bones’ track This Is England and promoting Advance UK popped up last month. One, made by the Node Project, shows Habib announcing Advance UK’s immigration policy. The other is from Advance UK’s youth wing and states that the English are “an ethnic group and nation native to England” over images of an armoured knight bearing the St George’s flag and thatched medieval-style housing.

Un-fucking-believable.  

The AI character of Bones – remember he isn’t real – made a number of interventions in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election, which was bitterly contested between the Greens, Reform and Labour. 

In one video, Bones calls the Green party publishing an Urdu version of a campaign video “un-fucking-believeable”. In another, he bemoans Green candidate Hannah Spencer’s victory because she “campaigned in Urdu [and] fucking Bengali, Palestinian and Pakistani flags everywhere, not a union jack in sight”. 

The AI-generated rapper goes on to claim that “Manchester’s anthem’s gonna be the call to fucking prayer before we know it”, while the cover of Oasis’s seminal 1994 album Definitely Maybe flashes across the screen. Disturbingly, in a reference to the diverse ethnic makeup of the constituency, Bones adds: “You lot got fuck all in common except a postcode.” 

In a third, Bones highlights claims of sectarianism from Reform’s Gorton and Denton candidate Matt Goodwin, and blames Reform for attempting to distance itself from those further to the right, saying: “Your party called us all extremists… I guess you got what you wanted.” 

Spencer told Novara Media that she finds how widespread AI content is becoming “really alarming”, and that political actors “hiding behind AI characters to promote their political messaging is both cowardly and undermines the integrity of our democracy”. 

The newly-elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton said: “I am concerned by the use, in particular, of AI characters who are used to spread misinformation and hatred about particular groups in society. 

“We need to be rebuilding trust in politics and politicians by delivering for people, not sowing division.”

The Node Project makes political videos with another AI character, too – a purple-haired “cute goth girl” called Amelia who was co-opted by the online far-right from a Home Office-funded anti-radicalisation video game.

The Node Project has attempted to create an extended universe with the two characters. Amelia appears in the music video for Bones’ track Shut Up, as the pair go on a rampage with assault rifles through an Orwellian Britain. Later, Amelia breaks Bones out of prison and the pair share a kiss. In another video, as Amelia slams the Green party’s Bengali translation campaign video, a Bones poster is clearly visible on her bedroom wall.

The borders between this fantasy world and real-life politics are increasingly blurred. Nick Buckley, Advance UK’s candidate for Gorton and Denton, made a tongue in cheek announcement that he had been “endorsed” by AI-generated Amelia last month. During the campaign, Buckley faced a backlash over a social media post from May 2025 in which he said that “many British young women are whores but don’t realise they are”. The former Reform mayoral candidate added that British women “make poor wives and poor mothers” and “contribute to the idea that all women are easy and can be abused”. He called the endorsement from Amelia “high praise indeed”. 

When questioned about Advance UK using the Node Project videos by the Bureau, Habib said: “We asked them to do it. I thought it went down very well. It got lots of likes and stuff.” He added “Some of it’s hard to recognise [as] CGI.”

Another senior figure at Advance UK said the Node Project was “a joy to work with” and that the party plans to commission more content from it.

A sign of things to come.

The involvement of political AI-generated characters in a hotly-contested by-election could be a sign of things to come.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told Novara Media that it expects “anyone using AI-generated campaign material to do so in a way that does not mislead voters, and to label it clearly so that voters know how it has been created”.

It also encouraged voters “to think critically about the material they see” and highlighted the need for all platforms that allow election content to create comprehensive social media ad libraries so users can see “detailed and accurate information such as the targeting, actual reach and amount spent”. 

Matteo Bergamini, founder of political and media literacy non-profit Shout Out UK, said the use of AI characters by political parties is a growing trend, and it’s “safe to assume these tactics will continue to grow in regularity as we get closer to the next general election”. 

The Node Project’s verified X account – complete with a cover photo of Bones leading a march of young white men with their fists raised – regularly posts and reposts ethnonationalist and Islamophobic content, interspersed with some Christian nationalism. 

It also interacts supportively with far-right figures including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe and Habib, even advocating for a merger between Habib’s Advance UK and Lowe’s Restore Britain. 

When contacted by the Bureau about Bones, TikTok banned the account for breaching its rules on hateful content; Instagram took down some content but did not ban the account; YouTube added transparency labels to let viewers know they are watching AI; and Spotify said the tracks went through human review and were not breaking its rules.

The Node Project told the Bureau that it is run by “a small group of creatives” and isn’t “tied to any label, movement or organisation”. It said Advance UK reached out towards the end of 2025 and commissioned the “British culture” video that previously sat on its homepage. 

The Node Project said “that video was something we chose to do creatively rather than as part of any formal arrangement” and “some other video pieces produced later were commissioned creative work and paid through existing creative businesses connected to the people involved in producing them”. The Node Project said it “isn’t affiliated with Advance UK and we don’t work for the party beyond those freelance commissions”. 

The Node Project didn’t address the operation’s content targeting the Gorton and Denton by-election, but denied the characterisation of the project or its content as Islamophobic. 

Advance UK has been contacted for comment.